NEAR MYTHS: "WHY ME? WHY NOT?" (HAGAR THE HORRIBLE, 1973)

 In THE LONG AND SHORT OF MYTH PART 3, I wrote:

As I said, the two BLONDIE strips are closer to real stories than the other strips, regardless of the presence or absence of plurisignificance. Still, they would best be labeled "sketches" or "vignettes," which means that even when they do possess super-functionality, it's used for very restricted purposes. For this reason, I doubt that I'll include many of these type of "gag strips" within the corpus of the "1001 myths project:" at present the aforementioned "Linus the Rain King" continuity is the only one that seems worthy.Ideally, the stories chosen for this project show the mythopoeic potentiality at its highest possible potential. And just as we judge the best dramas as being those that convince us that we're seeing simulacra of real people talk believably to one another, the best myth-stories are those that establish a believable "dialogue" between a variety of symbolic representations.

Most of the time, there probably still won't be any good reason to explore the simple vignette-type of gag strip. But here's one that garnered a certain amount of political fame. According to this online essay, Presidential candidate Joe Biden claimed that he'd kept the following HAGAR THE HORRIBLE strip on his desk since the 1972 loss of his son Beau.

Now, a lot of people keep comic strips that have a special, snapshot-like personal association for them. But the HAGAR strip relates well to what Jung called "transpersonal" associations, because it's patently using Hagar's particular situation-- the wreck of his Viking ship in a storm-- to put forth a condensed version of Job's argument with God. Admittedly any reader of the strip will know that Hagar's troubles are transitory; that by the next strip he'll back in his little Viking hut with his family, no worse for wear, because he's that type of cartoon character. But the answer of the unnamed sky-deity is one that many people can apply well to their real troubles. Why, in a world full of travails, should anyone expect not to be plagued by ill fortune?

All that said, there's nothing more than can be said about this two-panel strip, so "Why" does not present, as a concrescent work would, a "dialogue between a variety of symbolic representations."